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How I Met Your Mother: Meet the Real Mother — Director Pamela Fryman
On the last day of production of How I Met Your Mother, Alyson Hannigan and co-creator and executive producer Carter Bays implored fans to get #PamFryman trending on Twitter.
"I am the one person who is not on Twitter. At one point, I got a text from one of my kids that said, 'Mom, you're trending,'" Pamela Fryman, the show's longtime director, tells TVGuide.com. "I was like, 'Is that good?' Carter, when he found out, started hashtagging me up. It was so funny. I was like, 'Guys, I'm trending!'"
How I Met Your Mother: A chronological timeline of craziness
The Twitter love-fest came was not merely a public display of affection, but a public display of gratitude. Cristin Milioti might play the titular Mother, but the show's true matriarch - or "set mom" - is Fryman.
A veteran of Frasier, Just Shoot Me and Two and a Half Men, Fryman has been with HIMYM since the pilot and has helmed 196 of the show's 208 episodes, counting Monday's one-hour series finale. Outside of James Burrows directing every episode of Will & Grace and a majority of Cheers, such longevity and a singular voice and leadership in the director's chair are rare on long-running shows, which usually have a stable of directors or outsource them.
"I think we're all inherently nice people and try to be nice people, but Pam Fryman has set a tone on set from Season 1 where it was, like, the thing that took precedence over anything was that we all get along and that we all be kind and good to each other, and that the set be a pleasant place to be," Jason Segel says. "I can't imagine doing this for nine years in a different sort of environment, and I don't think it was just being smart. I think it's who Pam is in her heart. This has been like the nicest place to come for nine years. ... I've learned a lot just from being around Pam."
Adds Josh Radnor: "I can't imagine the show without Pam. This whole experience and the show would not be what it is without her."
Beyond her nurturing, warm guidance, Fryman also set the show's identity. Though HIMYM is Bays' and co-creator and executive producer Craig Thomas' baby, Fryman is the one who brought it to life. The duo had envisioned the comedy as a traditional multi-camera sitcom, but their pilot script, with its multiple time-jumps and cutaway jokes, resembled a one-hour drama with up to 60 scenes. "We were a little ambitious," Thomas quips. "If it weren't for Pam, we might not be on the air." Fryman's solution? An ingenious hybrid method that married the broad feel of multi-camera sitcoms with the stylish editing of single-camera comedies by shooting the show without an audience.
"This show is different because so many of the laughs are not only within the scenes, but in the transition from one scene to another," Fryman says. "You're not really laughing at the end of the A scene until you see what you're cutting to in the B scene, so there was just no way it was going to be pleasing to an audience. We had to do it without one."
How I Met Your Mother: Ranking Ted's girlfriends
The benefit of a live studio audience is getting immediate reactions to jokes and punchlines, but the lack of one fostered a tight-knit bond between the HIMYM cast and crew, and taught them to trust themselves. "The beauty of this show was we were able to look at each other and say, 'That's great,' or 'What else can we do?'" Fryman says. "We had the luxury of time because we didn't have to get the audience on their buses to go home. I was the one screaming at the cast, 'Energy!' They would always laugh at me because you have to keep it up when you have no audience. We had to create that for ourselves. Our crew provided that audience feel. Ultimately it all worked out well. It was tough in the beginning, but we got good at it."
Though Fryman "fell in love" with Bays and Thomas, and the show pitch during their initial meeting at a Starbucks in 2005, there was never a concrete plan at first for her to direct beyond the pilot. After CBS ordered the show to series, she jumped at the chance to continue with it.
"It turns out I'm a very small person because I just wouldn't give it up!" she says, adding that she and Bays and Thomas balanced each other out. "I had been doing this for a while, and Carter and Craig were new to this. I knew things that I could help them with and they were the creative geniuses behind it. It just was so much fun that I didn't want to leave and fortunately, they didn't want me to go anywhere, and I got to wrap it up, which is amazing. But at that moment then, it never occurred to me that nine years later, I'd be there - nevermind all the things we did in these nine years."
HIMYM's non-linear, from-the-future narrative structure and excess of scenes (they've shot 9,125 scenes in total), naturally, made particular episodes difficult to shoot. But they also gave way to inventive, memorable moments (Two-Minute Date, anyone?). There was nothing Bays, Thomas and the writers came up with that Fryman didn't find a way to make it onto the screen somehow.
8 things to know about HIMYM's final episodes
"Certainly when some outlines and scripts came out, we were like, 'It turns out we don't have time to do this. Can we do this instead?' But there was never like, 'C'mon, how are we going to do that?' Cockamouse was the most ridiculous thing, but we laughed so hard," Fryman says. "The most difficult ones are the ones you don't think are going to be difficult. ... Early on, Carter and Craig ... were thinking, 'We're going to do a show all in a limo. How easy is that?' They were so proud of themselves. Well, shooting in a car is really tough! They were like, 'Aw, man! We really don't get it.' The big ones - the 100th with the huge number from Neil [Patrick Harris], the Farhampton set with the rain - they were all challenging, but in a wonderful way.
"The great thing is it made us all better; it certainly made me better," she continues. "If you had told me that I was going to be doing all these things, I would've said, 'You probably should get someone else.' It was so exciting and everybody pitched in and did what they could do. ... It's such a team effort that the most challenging stuff is usually the most fun stuff. I think we've done it all. We were kind of creating stuff as we went. I don't think we ever couldn't do something."
The toughest episode for Fryman had nothing to do with set-ups, limos, musical numbers or tracking shots, but saying goodbye. The last scene shot was "brutal" - though it's not the last scene of the finale, which Fryman assures will be "very satisfying" to longtime fans, if you're one who subscribes to the Dead Mother theory. A week prior, the five main cast members filmed their final scene together, which is also not the show's last scene, as Segel had film commitments.
"You could've heard a pin drop on that stage," Fryman says. "To see the five of them after nine years still loving each other, still respecting each other and just being this fantastic ensemble, it was - as a mother, forgive me, because that's what I am - just tough. They made me do the slate, which was hilarious. Then I got to watch these five people that I love so much and I'm so genuinely proud of. I think everybody that knows this show and has been on this ride with us will really get to see how much these people mean to each other, as characters and as people off-screen."
How I Met Your Mother: Does it matter if The Mother is dead?
Of course, the feeling is mutual. On the penultimate day of production, the cast and crew lured Fryman - because of a "fire drill" - to the studio lot, where they surprised her with a huge banner.
"We go outside and I'm standing facing away from the stage and I turn around and they have hung a banner on Stage 22," she says. "This will tell you what kind of an experience this has been for me. They were trying to get me to cry the whole week. I did not cry then. ... When we finally wrapped, literally when I did the last shot, I started talking. I didn't plan to, but there were just some things I wanted to say. My voice cracked. Everybody was like, 'Oh!' I was like, 'OK. Everybody got what they wanted. Here I go. You're happy.' I thought I held it together long enough. I'm forever indebted to Carter and Craig. It's really been the most remarkable nine years of my career."
How I Met Your Mother's series finale airs Monday at 8/7c on CBS.
(Full disclosure: TVGuide.com is owned by CBS.)
View original How I Met Your Mother: Meet the Real Mother - Director Pamela Fryman at TVGuide.com
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Color Options from American Patchwork & Quilting December 2009
Holiday Sparkle
Fussy-cut a beautiful fabric to star in the center of gemlike quilt blocks. Choose a holiday print with metallic touches for a throw that really shines.
Holiday Sparkle Color Option
Designers Chloe Anderson and Colleen Reale loved Holiday Sparkle's fabric mix of florals, paisleys, and mosaics so much that they used the same fabric line in another colorway to make a second version of the quilt.
Just Ducky
Make a sweet flannel quilt suitable for your favorite little one-boy or girl. The simple appliqué is an updated take on old-fashioned pull toys.
Just Ducky Color Option
Three-Color Pinwheels
Use three colors to draw attention to Pinwheel units. This wall hanging utilized romantic floral and toiles from the Always and Forever collection by Alex Anderson for P&B Textiles.
Perfectly Perched
A needle-turn-appliqué bird sits among ripe pairs in this small, primitive wall hanging. Funky buttons, hand-embroidered stems, and a background with just a bit of piecing give the finished quilt movement.
Perfectly Perched Color Option
Spring Bird Appliqué
Make a springtime scene using the Hopscotch and Tokyo Basics collections from Red Rooster Fabrics. Create a wall hanging in no time using fusible appliqué to assemble the bird, tree, and pear motifs and fussy-cutting the flower pieces.
Spiced Cider
Grab a cup of your favorite beverage, a book or magazine, and this warm-tone throw to settle in for an afternoon of reading. Star blocks alternate with hourglass blocks to compose a stunning, scrappy quilt.
Spiced Color Option
Hourglass Stars Wall Hanging
Sew a bright wall hanging using lime green, pink, orange, purple, and brown prints from the whimsical Fandango collection for Henry Glass & Co. With careful fabric selection, you can highlight the quilt's star or hourglass blocks. Fabric placement in the hourglass blocks also creates a secondary star design.
All Snowed In
Though snow may be falling outside, the warm glow of a hearth shines out of each window. Use a polka dot background to simulate snow in the stitched village.
All Snowed In Color Option
House and Trees Wall Hanging
Use house and tree blocks to create a homey wall hanging. Choose stripe fabrics for some of the architectural elements to make it appear as if there are bricks in the chimney and siding on the house. Fabrics are from the Millie's Garden collection by Joined at the Hip for Clothworks.
Mixed Bouquet
Solids and prints play off each other in this reproduction-fabrics throw, which showcases a new interpretation of the Chrysanthemum block.
Mixed Bouquet Color Option
Framed Floral Wall Hanging
Frame a single beautiful block in fabric. A mitered a middle border enhances the effect. Use Jinny Beyer's Hermitage collection for RJR Fabrics to achieve the serene, evening-garden palette.
Branching Out
While it looks like traditional needle-turn appliqué, this seasonal quilt is all sewn by machine. You should be able to get it done in time for gift-giving!
Branching Out Color Option
Stars and Vines Appliqué
Quiltmaker Laura Boehnke utilized fusible appliqué and a small zigzag stitch to easily assemble an appliqué wall hanging. Two in the Bush Flannel and Woolies Flannel by Bonnie Sullivan for Maywood Studio add texture to the quilt.
Illusion in Neutrals
Neutral batiks in shades from light cream to deep purple-black form an intriguing, barely there diamond pattern over the entire quilt top. The pieced blocks are as easy as making triangle-squares.
Illusion in Neutrals Color Option
Lime Squares Wall Hanging
High-contrast fabrics from the Kiwi collection by Alice Kennedy for Timeless Treasures Fabrics combine to make a sassy wall hanging. A mellow print complements each bright color and busy print.
Spiral Stocking
Don't let the sight of all these small pieces scare you. They're actually cut big enough to handle easily, then trimmed to size after they're sewn in place.
Spiral Stocking Color Option
Designer RaNae Merrill made a second stocking out of fabric from the Snow Show collection by Susan Winget for Benartex. For more information of what else you can do with foundation-pieced spirals, check out RaNae's book, Simply Amazing Spiral Quilts (Krause, 2008).

subset: commoncrawl


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Derek Owusu talks about the emotional challenges faced by British black men when it comes to Eurocentric norms of attractiveness
Until recently, it never occurred to me to wonder how black men feel about their physical appearance. Looks are something we generally joke about, cuss each other for or talk about lightly, skimming the surface but never discussing seriously. This all changed for me when I felt the most insecure I've ever felt. And, embarrassingly, it was triggered by the ITV show Love Island. Newly available on Netflix, I decided to binge watch seasons 1 to 3 and catch up with everyone about to settle in for season 4 — a season being dubbed a dream for white women who love mixed-raced men.
Each series begins with a brief profile of each contestant–a bit of talk focusing on what they're about and what they do. And then it's the 'Couple Up'. This is where I began to feel rattled. With all of the men lined up side by side, silent, grinning white teeth, waiting for the opportunity to step forward and offer themselves up to the women soon to be making an appearance, there was plenty of time for me to take in how good looking most of them were and how different I felt compared to them.
True, these men were a hundred shades lighter than me, but that didn't stop my mind, at that moment, from wondering why I too wasn't born into an Adonis-like shell. Added to this was my recollection of season 3's contestant, Marcel, who I became aware of without actually watching the series he appeared in. A dark-skinned man, it was a running joke on Twitter that he was somehow getting darker, or "turning purple". For many weeks, no one stepped forward for him. Not until the arrival of Gabby did it seem possible for a dark-skinned black man to look attractive amongst a sea of white lads. But even after his long-anticipated coupling, social media speculated that it wasn't Marcel's attractiveness that had interested Gabby; it was the opportunity to win viewers over and secure the prize money. She was playing the game; Marcel was being used.
Thinking about all this I began to feel silly, looking in the mirror and scrutinising my face, my nose, my lips, my teeth, my skin. Was I took dark? My nose too wide, lips too big and prone to cracking? And do other black men ever feel this way? For this piece, I decided to find out by speaking to a few guys to ask what they think.
Growing up everyone has that moment when they suddenly become aware of their appearance, either through people's reactions to it, compliments and criticism, or just because we're fascinated by mirrors and spend a lot of time staring into them. For many of the men I spoke to, it was the comments that precipitated insecurities first. "When I got my glasses, I started noticing people were calling me Steve Urkel." 32-year-old Joseph says. "I never found that funny. [It was] just another reason to throw me under the bus for not being a conventionally attractive child". The Urkel trope is common in the black community, being used against "nerdy" black men who didn't fit into the mould of black masculinity. As well as this, oddly, your appearance could be mocked for being "too" black in certain areas but not black enough in others, as 23-year-old Adrian explains: "I was made fun of because of the size of my lips," he explained to me, "and because I was fair-skinned, I was called beige and big lips" remarks that made him wonder if he could change these aspects somehow.
Being acutely aware of your facial features is one of the gifts handed down to black communities via decades of racism and dehumanisation at the hands of Europeans. The mocking of facial features – nose, lips, teeth and hair- inevitably found its way into black families, with 'light' teasing becoming a sport exercised without any thought about its consequences. 26-year-old Alex remembers this starting from childhood "When I was 10 years old, my dad always used to make comments about my nose… He meant it in a joking way but when he tried to make the same joke with my sister, my mum shut it down. It meant to me that they didn't care about boys' appearance being ridiculed."
So many of us have been made to feel the same way, that our worth lies outside our looks – there's no point worrying about trying to be attractive because we can't be. That's why it's important we're able to be open about how much comments on our appearance hurt, or how some days we too feel insecure, undesirable and ugly. As things are, this would be perceived as weakness, or "moist".
It's interesting to explore what goes through the mind when feeling physically unattractive, and which coping mechanisms are employed when it becomes too much to bear. Some are long term character diminishing reactions such as Raheim's: "it actually got to a point where if someone did show an interest in me…my initial thought was, they're not really attracted to me, I don't believe you, so I developed no feelings." And others were shorter, more immediate reactions such as Alex and Kwame's: "if I could hide, if I could make myself smaller", said Alex, "then I [would]. I'd feel like crawling into the fetal position. If I could find a way to get out of the light…". "On those days I just wish I could crawl into a ball", Kwame continued, "and forget my face".
The boys I spoke to rarely expressed these feelings or thoughts to anyone, and if they did, they were marred by obvious suppressions. The crippling feelings and insecure moments mostly stayed within them, without adequate expression to exorcise them, or loving words to heal them. "Men are not supposed to care about their appearance the same way women do. So how can I cry about feeling ugly? Seems weak, and everyone knows men can make up for it and attract people in other ways.
The consensus seems to be that we should use other assets to make up for facial shortcomings. After all, money can boost our wardrobe–or perhaps length and girth are all we need in the end (again, see this season's Love Island and references to mixed race Wez below the belt)? But will a mortgage-priced car and Jay-Z-inspired hublot matched with a hyper-sexualised existence provide any solace when you're alone, in low spirits, and face to face with a discomforting reflection in the mirror? Black men are notoriously guarded when it comes to their feelings and trying to get them to honestly discuss their physical appearance is a challenge not many will be interested in taking up. But I feel if we are able to talk sincerely about the days when we feel undesirable, a whole new world of expression will open up thereafter and we'll be on course for a healthier emotional life.
If you enjoyed this, and want more like it, then please consider making a donation, it can be anything from £2 and takes no time at all. Or give what you can afford from £2 per month and become an MD member.
Derek Owusu is a writer, mentor and host on literature podcast, Mostly Lit. He discovered literature at the age of 23 while studying exercise science at university and soon after dedicated his life to reading and writing.
All work published on MD is the intellectual property of its creators, and requires permission to be republished. Contact us if you have any questions.


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GLIZAR Salma Earring
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2. Please make sure you don't include non-GLIZAR items by accident in your return package. We will not be responsible for sending back those items to you and it may cause customs delay and package loss.


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The Republican Right Wing Extremist Tea Party continues to hold the US Government hostage. Looking like this could go on a while with the House crazies looking to link raising the Debt Ceiling to Obamacare. First up today a little humor. Following that is a great article from Business Week highlighting the likely impacts of the Tea Party forcing the US into defaulting on its debt. Really scary stuff!
A U.S. Default Seen as Catastrophe
Dwarfing Lehman's Fall
Anyone who remembers the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. little more than five years ago knows what a global financial disaster is. A U.S. government default, just weeks away if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling as it now threatens to do, will be an economic calamity like none the world has ever seen.
Failure by the world's largest borrower to pay its debt — unprecedented in modern history — will devastate stock markets from Brazil to Zurich, halt a $5 trillion lending mechanism for investors who rely on Treasuries, blow up borrowing costs for billions of people and companies, ravage the dollar and throw the U.S. and world economies into a recession that probably would become a depression. Among the dozens of money managers, economists, bankers, traders and former government officials interviewed for this story, few view a U.S. default as anything but a financial apocalypse.
The $12 trillion of outstanding government debt is 23 times the $517 billion Lehman owed when it filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008. As politicians butt heads over raising the debt ceiling, executives from Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s Warren Buffett to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s Lloyd C. Blankfein have warned that going over the edge would be catastrophic.
Lehman Aftermath
"If it were to occur — and it's a big if — one would expect a series of legal triggers, potentially transmitting the default to many other markets," said Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., the world's largest fixed-income manager. "All this would add to the headwinds facing economic growth. It would also undermine the role of the U.S. in the world economy."
The U.S. stock market lost almost half its value in the five months following Lehman's failure. The country had its worst recession since the Great Depression (INDU), taking the global economy down with it. Unemployment (USURTOT) surged to 10 percent, the highest in three decades.
Another depression was prevented only by unprecedented action by the Federal Reserve, which pumped $3 trillion into the financial system. The U.S. Treasury provided about $300 billion of capital for the nation's banks.
"If we miss an interest payment, that would blow Lehman out of the water," said Tim Bitsberger, a former Treasury official under President George W. Bush and now a New York-based managing director at BNP Paribas SA. "Lehman was an isolated company, and now we are talking about the U.S. government."
'Nuclear Bombs'
Buffett has asked politicians to stop using the debt limit as a weapon in policy debates. Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman urged employees to contact their congressmen to remind them about the "unacceptable consequences" of a default.
"It should be like nuclear bombs, basically too horrible to use," Buffett, 83, said in an interview published by Fortune magazine last week.
The yield on 10-year U.S. bonds dropped to a two-month low of 2.58 percent on Oct. 3. It was 2.61 percent at 10:25 a.m. in New York trading today. While short-term bill rates and the cost to insure against a default have risen, volatility in Treasuries has fallen, a sign that investor confidence in the Fed's bond-purchase program is outweighing worries over the budget battle.
Bond prices didn't foretell Lehman's default either. Ten days before the bankruptcy, Lehman bonds were trading at about 95 cents on the dollar, the same level as JPMorgan Chase & Co. debt at the time.
'Holy Cripes'
One unexpected consequence of Lehman's collapse was the seizing up of the repurchase agreement, or repo, market — a form of secured, short-term borrowing used by Wall Street banks and investment firms. Many of Lehman's trading counterparts discovered the collateral they believed was backing their loans wasn't there to grab as rules allowed. That scared investors in the rest of the market, closing off other trades and leading to fire sales of securities and further price declines.
A government default could freeze the repo market more than Lehman's collapse because U.S. debt forms its backbone. At least $2.8 trillion of Treasuries serve as collateral for repo and reverse-repo loans, according to Fed data.
In the event of a default, Treasuries might no longer be eligible as collateral for repo agreements, according to James Kochan, Wells Fargo Funds Management LLC's chief fixed-income strategist. The cheap funding for the holdings lowers the yields demanded on the investments, and unwinding the positions could amplify losses for lenders and borrowers.
If Treasuries were ejected from the market, "Well, holy cripes," Kochan said in an interview.
Congressional Gridlock
In 2011, the last time Congress was gridlocked over the extension of the debt ceiling, repo rates rose as money-market funds pulled back because they didn't want the risk of holding a security in default.
"A lot of this is about fear of the unknown," said Scott Skyrm, a former head of repo and money markets for Newedge USA LLC and author of "The Money Noose: Jon Corzine and the Collapse of MF Global." "There is no upside to being in the market in that environment, so people pull out."
The U.S. didn't default on its debt in 2011. Republicans and Democrats reached a last-minute deal to raise the borrowing limit. Even so, the posturing hurt consumer confidence and wiped out $6 trillion of value from global stocks.
Historical Lessons
While none of the people interviewed for this story expect the world's largest economy to default this time either, most say the chances of it happening now are higher than in the past.
"It would be insane to default, but it's no longer a zero-percent probability," said Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund who teaches economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a columnist for Bloomberg View.
The U.S. hasn't defaulted since 1790, when the newly formed nation deferred until 1801 interest obligations on debt it assumed from the states, according to "This Time Is Different," a history of financial crises by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.
In 1933, the U.S. refused to make payments in gold to redeem bonds that gave holders the option of requesting the precious metal instead of cash. While investors were paid on time and in full, some argued it was a default because they couldn't claim payment in gold. The Supreme Court ruled that the government was within its rights to deny such claims as long as it paid the dollar amounts.
Technical Default
In 1979, the U.S. was late to make payments on about $122 million of bills, in part because of "severe technical difficulties" that the Treasury said stemmed from a word-processing failure, according to the Financial Review's August 1989 issue. While payments were made after a short delay, including with interest for tardiness, the hiccup caused yields to rise by half a percentage point and stay there for months.
A default today could be deemed "technical" because it would be the result of the government's unwillingness to pay, not its ability, JPMorgan analysts including Alex Roever said in a report last week.
In a technical default, only the prices of Treasury bonds that mature or have coupon payments would fall, according to the analysts. Money-market funds wouldn't be forced to sell government bonds, and the Fed probably would continue accepting them as collateral for emergency cash.
That distinction is nothing more than an effort to downplay the danger of default, according to MIT's Johnson. Sovereign defaults are always about the political will to pay because most governments can print money to make payments if they want to, Johnson said.
Insufficient Funds
Labeled technical or not, a default is still a default, said Jim Grant, founder of Grant's Interest Rate Observer.
"People have typically turned to Treasuries as a safe haven, but what will happen when they realize it's not safe anymore," said Grant, who has followed interest rates since the 1970s. "Financial markets are all confidence-based. If that confidence is shaken, you have disaster."
Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew has said the government will have only $30 billion of cash left by Oct. 17 to meet its commitments. Those can run as high as $60 billion a day, which means the Treasury will need to borrow more to meet its liabilities, Lew said. Goldman Sachs expects the Treasury's cash balance to be depleted by Oct. 31 and "possibly quite a bit sooner," analysts at the bank wrote in an Oct. 5 report.
Borrowing Costs
The Treasury has $120 billion of short-term bonds coming due on Oct. 17, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. An additional $93 billion of bills are due on Oct. 24. On the last day of the month, $150 billion needs to be paid back, including two-year and five-year notes that mature. The total due from Oct. 17 through Nov. 7 is $417 billion.
While some expect a 2013 default will drive up yields only on Treasury securities coming due, others including former Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman see a wider impact in bond yields, pushing up borrowing costs.
"That would be higher interest costs over some considerable period of time for the U.S. and for U.S. taxpayers," said Altman, who's chairman of New York-based investment bank Evercore Partners Inc.
Some point to Standard & Poor's 2011 downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, which led to an increase in Treasury prices, not a drop. Even after the rating was lowered by one level to AA+ from AAA, investors continued buying U.S. government bonds as they flocked to safety, according to Joe Davis, chief economist at Vanguard Group Inc.
Disappearing Liquidity
A downgrade to default rating would be different, said Peter Tchir, founder of New York-based TF Market Advisors. Investors, structured vehicles, collateral agreements, derivatives contracts and other trading covenants have ratings-based rules that could force the replacement of Treasuries in a trade or portfolio, he said.
"Once the system starts to break down related to settlement and payments, then liquidity disappears, as we saw after Lehman," Tchir said. "Perhaps the things we're worried about now will be fine after a U.S. default, but who knows what others will not be."
Treasuries are among the most popular forms of collateral pledged at derivatives clearinghouses, including the one owned byCME Group Inc. (CME:US), the world's largest futures market. Government agencies such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which use interest-rate swaps and derivatives to hedge mortgage portfolios, would be affected by a downgrade because it could lower their counterparty ratings and result in more collateral being demanded by trading partners.
'Create Chaos'
"We can't even imagine all the things that might happen, just like Henry Paulson couldn't imagine all the bad things that might happen if he let Lehman go down," said Bill Isaac, chairman of Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bancorp and a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., referring to the former U.S. Treasury secretary. "It would create chaos in financial markets."
Higher borrowing costs could slow the housing recovery. If 30-year mortgage rates climbed to 6.5 percent from 4.5 percent, a borrower who can now afford the monthly payment on a $200,000 loan would only be able to take on about $160,000 of debt when buying a property, forcing down sale prices.
It would be "bad — both for affordability and for consumer confidence," said Jed Kolko, chief economist for Trulia Inc., an online property-listing service.
Banks would have to write down securities on their books that are losing value and face capital shortfalls, according to MIT's Johnson.
"The government wouldn't have the cash to rescue the banks this time either," Johnson said.
China, Japan
About half of the U.S. debt is held by foreign governments, central banks and other overseas investors, according to Treasury data. A default would throw those holdings into question as well as the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency, Johnson said. During the 2011 debt-ceiling scare, foreign investors shunned Treasury auctions for about three months, according to data compiled by JPMorgan.
China is the largest holder of U.S. Treasuries, with $1.3 trillion in July, according to Treasury data. Japan follows with $1.1 trillion.
Even if Treasury prices aren't affected by a default, the damage in other markets could be devastating. U.S. stocks fell 7 percent in one day when Congress rejected the government's bank-rescue package in 2008, before passing it a few days later.
Market Shocks
The market shocks would be enough to tip the U.S. back into recession and drag the world economy down, according to Desmond Lachman, a fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute. The event could prove to be the trigger that reverses a weak and fragile recovery, said William Cunningham, head of credit portfolios for the investment arm of Columbus, Ohio-based Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. Lehman's collapse was a similar spark, he said.
"Is this the straw among other things that tips an economy without drivers of growth back down into a negative spiral?" Cunningham said.
While a short-lived default might be fixed without major damage to the global economy, drawing a line between short and long isn't easy, according to Evercore's Altman.
"If you missed an interest payment by two hours, the markets might look entirely beyond that and forgive you," Altman said. "If you miss an interest payment by two days, four days, six days, that's a different story. It's very difficult to be scientific about this."
'Flying Blind'
During the final days of Lehman Brothers, Wall Street firms set up war rooms to chart the potential impact of the firm's demise and prepare strategies to cope with the consequences. Their scenarios, which focused on credit-default swaps, didn't forecast the contagion that quickly spread after the bankruptcy.
Now, some banks are preparing contingency plans for a possible U.S. default, such as stocking retail branches with more cash, the New York Times reported last week. Those preparations might prove useless once again.
"Nobody knows what would happen if there were a default because the reality is there's never been even a technical default in the U.S.," said Russ Koesterich, chief investment strategist at BlackRock Inc., the world's largest asset manager. "Everyone's flying blind."


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How I Spent My Summer Vacation
October 10, 2008
After a somewhat longer summer hiatus than planned, I'm back with some notes on a few recent early television discoveries. By now there aren't too many TV shows from the fifties or sixties with which I'm totally unfamiliar, but until last year's complete DVD release of the series, Man with a Camera (1958-60) fell into that category. This was one of the few half-hour action series of the late fifties of which (to my knowledge) no episodes had circulated among private libraries, and I suspect many TV enthusiasts were curious about it for two reasons. First, it starred Charles Bronson, long before Bronson became the movies' oldest action hero; and second, for us hard-core TV wonks, it was the show that the talented producer Buck Houghton was running immediately before he moved to MGM to oversee the first three seasons of The Twilight Zone. Houghton was a line producer, not a writer, so one doesn't expect to find any kind of thematic or stylistic connection, but this modest little low-budget effort was assembled with the same care that make the grander MGM-backlot fantasies of The Twilight Zone so visually compelling.
Bronson always struck me as the unlikeliest of stars, and Man with a Camera is something of a case study in how his frozen visage and monotone voice can produce a kind of anti-charismatic charisma. Whatever his deficiencies as an actor, Bronson had confidence, and he's surprisingly loose when the opportunity presents himself. In "The Bride," for instance, Kovic briefly poses as a naïve, heavily-accented immigrant negotiating a mail-order marriage, and the fun that Bronson has with this goofy scene is contagious.
Based on the little I had read, I wasn't sure exactly what form Man with a Camera would take. Newspaper drama? International adventure? It turns out to be a de facto detective drama, one of those shows in which people with no business fighting crime nevertheless do so. Johnny Staccato, a Greenwich Village nightclub owner/unlicensed private dick, was a contemporaneous figure, and they still crop up on TV now and then – Hack (2002-2004) starred David Morse as a Philadelphia cab driver who doubled as a vigilante for hire. These series make one wonder: why not just make a show about actual private eyes (or cops), instead of burdening the writers with the chore of explaining every week how a photographer or a restaurateur got himself into this mess?
In the case of Man with a Camera, the first dozen or so episodes tell plausible, if cliched, stories consistent with actual photojournalism, at least if you grant that Kovic is the rush-off-to-battle-zone macho-adventurer type of photojournalist. Kovic tries to snap a shot of an Appalachia-style gangsters' summit ("The Big Squeeze"), gets accused of doctoring a pic of a bigwig politician ("Turntable"), and exposes crimes while covering a boxing match ("Second Avenue Assassin") and the testing of a new military plane ("Another Barrier").
Over time, the number of actual photographers credited as technical advisors dwindled from three to one, and later scripts barely attempted to justify why Kovic was investigating Mexican drug smuggling ("Missing") or bodyguarding an arrogant movie star in Cannes ("Kangaroo Court"). "But there's a picture angle!" insists a client as he begs Kovic to investigate a blackmail ring preying on adopted children in "Girl in the Dark." Thanks for the reminder.
A little more often than most fifties crime dramas, Man with a Camera varied the standard mystery-plus-fisticuffs equation. The most unusual episode, the lynch mob story "Six Faces of Satan," is essentially The Twilight Zone's "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" minus the science fiction angle. The earnest script, by David P. Harmon, is as subtle as a brick against the back of the head, but director Boris Sagal stages it with a claustrophobic fervor that never allows the tension to subside. It's all tight angles, angry faces shoved into the lens, crowds converging and dispersing as the camera probes the tiny interior New York street set.
The milder pleasures of "Hot Ice Cream," an amusement park murder story, chiefly stem from the oddball pairing of guest stars Yvonne Craig (delightful as a precocious teenaged camera buff) and Lawrence Tierney, the latter's bald dome, if not his surly disposition, concealed by a jaunty ice cream vendor's cap. And speaking of guest stars, does anyone recognize this actor, who makes a very early, and uncredited, appearance in the episode "The Bride":
If Man with a Camera stands out as an above average example of the sort of undemanding escapism that was becoming the bread and butter of late-fifties network TV, then Tate (1960), the entire run of which has also been disgorged on DVD in a single chunk, is a more exciting kind of revelation: a serious, important, and unjustly forgotten western.
Tate was created and story-edited by Harry Julian Fink, a talented writer who probably received a deal for his own series on the strength of a number of thoughtful Have Gun Will Travel episodes. Fink's show is a western which confronts directly the one aspect of the generally very adult Have Gun that was gussied up a little for television: the hero's profession. Have Gun's Paladin sought and carried out assignments that made use of his skill with a firearm, but in practice the show was never as mercenary as its title. The tone of the stories varied from grim to frothy, and Paladin (and the series' writers) took pride in concocting intricate, non-violent forms of conflict resolution. Tate, on the other hand, is simply and bluntly a hired killer, something about which he has no illusions and makes no apologies. He doesn't live in an ornate San Francisco hotel suite or savor expensive cigars. Tate is dusty and beat-down and often wears a serape to conceal his handicap, a useless left arm that he keeps holstered in a mean-looking, elbow-length leather glove.
The first episode, "Home Town," is a near-perfect examination of masculine stoicism and obligation. In it Tate returns to the town of his birth to help his mentor, an aging marshal (Royal Dano), protect a prisoner from a lynch mob. It's a futile endeavor, of course, in the sense that the unrepentant murderer will likely hang anyway, and that's the point. Fink seems to challenge himself to convey Tate's backstory as unsentimentally as possible. Here's an exchange that includes the only explanation we ever get for Tate's dead arm:
MARSHAL: How long's it been?
TATE: Ten years.
MARSHAL: The war and then some. Where'd it happen?
TATE: Vicksburg. I didn't run fast enough, Morty.
MARSHAL: You're home, son. What do you think of it?
TATE: The same. A little smaller, a little dirtier. Just a memory, Morty, it doesn't exist any more.
Tate's wife is buried in the same town, and again Fink conveys this element of the character's psychological makeup obliquely. There's a lovely scene between Tate and a waitress (Sandra Knight) who turns out to be his wife's cousin. They discuss the girl's resemblance to Mary Tate, but Tate never tells her that Mary was his wife. All the emotion remains unspoken. The scene ends with an iris into the cousin's face: a technique from the silent cinema so powerful that, by 1960, it was often used ironically. But here it's perfect, a way of releasing the pent-up sadness of the moment through form instead of dialogue.
"Stopover," the second, and perhaps best, episode, is even more avant-garde. Fink, who wrote the script, underlines a local law officer's disgust when Tate rides into town with a corpse across his saddle. While the sheriff executes some bureaucratic maneuvers to delay the payment of the bounty, Tate cools his heels in a saloon where he runs smack into a twitchy punk who wants to test his gun against him. It's a familiar setup, but Fink fills it with unexpected ideas: an emphasis on money (the bounty is $2,080, and Tate insists on the $80); the extreme lengths to which Tate goes to avoid a gun duel that won't yield a profit; the lack of ambiguity concerning a saloon girl's actual profession (she charges five dollars to bring the guests an "extra blanket"). Smith, the young gunslinger, is not just an analogue to the modern juvenile delinquents of the fifties (a common notion in films like Nicholas Ray's The True Story of Jesse James and Arthur Penn's The Left-Handed Gun). He's quite clearly a psychopath in a clinical sense. Fink makes this point mainly through the young man's speech, which is fanciful to the point of incomprehensibility. At one point, he refers to man Tate has killed as "a magical person," an anachronistic, New Age-y phrase that startles one into thinking of Smith more in terms of Manson worship than of western villainy.
Indeed, "Stopover" is about language, or the failure of communication. Tate and the young gun talk past each other throughout their encounter: the gunman wants to know who he's challenging, but Tate won't tell him his name, while Tate keeps probing to find out the relationship between Smith and the dead man. He can't wrap his mind around the idea that there might not be any connection between them – that violence can occur without a rational motive.
Television westerns were, of course, plentiful in the extreme during the fifties and sixties, a fact that necessitated as much differentiation as possible. A wide range of generic traditions and storytelling approaches characterize the major TV westerns: The Virginian told sweeping, epic tales which emphasized the vastness of the effort to settle the frontier; Wagon Train was a dramatic anthology in disguise, eschewing western naturalism in favor of character-driven stories; The Rifleman was a bildungsroman that reduced the west to a canvas for illustrating life lessons; and so on.
I think the most productive model for the TV western, the one best suited to the limitations of the small screen, was the sort of spare, unsentimental ultra-minimalism that characterizes Budd Boetticher's and some of Anthony Mann's film westerns. The two key series in this mode were Sam Peckinpah's quirky The Westerner and Rod Serling's blatantly existential The Loner. Tate belongs within this tradition, although it's not quite at the same level as those two masterworks.
One problem is David McLean, who plays Tate ("Just Tate," incidentally, the missing first name a midpoint marker on the way to Eastwood's Man with No Name). McLean has the right world-weary look and gruff voice for the role – he was later famous as a cowboy-styled cigarette pitchman. But his performance lacks depth; as the series progresses it becomes evident that McLean is cycling through the same four or five line readings, and the guest stars nudge him off the screen. (It doesn't help McLean that Tate's uncredited but canny casting director paired him with an unusual number of future stars: Louise Fletcher, Martin Landau, Robert Culp, James Coburn, Warren Oates, and, in small but showy roles in two episodes, Robert Redford.)
But the primary failure of Tate was a lack of sustainability. Unlike Rod Serling on The Twilight Zone or Stirling Silliphant on Route 66, Harry Julian Fink fumbled the critical step of finding gifted, complementary voices to fill in the gaps between his own contributions. The six Tates written by Fink, all but one of them gems, and the seven episodes penned by lesser writers might as well be from two wholly different series. By the last episode, Gerry Day's "The Return of Jessica Jackson," there's a lamentable scene in which Tate pulls out a Bible and proselytizes to the distraught heroine. This Tate is a far more conventional TV hero than the Tate of the pilot, a terse pragmatist of uncertain morality, adrift on a sea of grief and regret.
Not that it mattered much: Tate ran as a replacement series in the summer of 1960, meaning that NBC had likely abandoned any plans for renewing it even before the series debuted. Just like The Westerner and The Loner, both of which were short-lived, Tate was too cerebral and too downbeat for the mainstream.
(A brief note for the Corrections Department: One frustrating bit of misinformation which has proliferated across the internet, even on the official page for the Tate DVD, is that the series was videotaped. In fact, the quickest glimpse at any Tate episode reveals that it was shot on film, not with the clunky video cameras of the era, which were limited in both resolution and range of motion. I'm not sure how that idea got started, except perhaps that the show carries an onscreen copyright in the name of Roncom Video Films – Perry Como's production company. But the term "video," at that time, was an industry synonym for television.)
At the other end of the scale is Laredo (1965-1967), which lives down to its reputation as one of the least distinguished of nineteen-sixties westerns. In fact, it's one of the worst TV shows, period, and perhaps a minor benchmark in the dumbing down of the medium.
Laredo concerns the adventures of three rowdy Texas rangers, played by Neville Brand, Peter Brown, and William Smith. (Philip Carey, cashing a paycheck, delivers a scene's worth of exposition in each episode and then disappears, just as Rick Jason had taken to doing in the later years of Combat.) It's distinguished from the glut of other westerns of its time mainly by its strident efforts to maintain a would-be comedic tone. Mainly, this means that, in the midst of carrying out the usual lawman's duties of leading posses and fighting Indians, the heroes incessantly needle and play elaborate pranks upon one another. It's the first, but by no means the last, TV show I can think of in which adults behave like hyperactive pre-teens for no discernible reason – except, perhaps, kinship with a target demographic.
What's startling about Laredo is how cruel and violent its prank subplots are. In the first episode, for example, Reese Bennett (Brand) retaliates against the other two rangers for their earlier mockery by leaving them bound in an Indian camp, where they're later tortured. In that instance, Reese gets the upper hand, but in most episodes Cooper (Brown) and Riley (Smith) outfox him. Brand's performance makes this dynamic extremely uncomfortable. I can imagine that Brand was trying to create a Paul Bunyanesque caricature – a Texan who was so dumb that he, et cetera, et cetera. But Reese is so helplessly stupid, and his chums are so smug and superior, that the experience is akin to watching schoolyard bullies taunt a retarded child. Laredo unavoidably implicates the viewer in its peculiar brand of cruelty – never is civility imposed on any of the characters – and I, for one, didn't feel like playing. Perhaps I've just lost my capacity, over the last, oh, eight or so years, to be amused by imbecilic Texan authority figures whose chief character traits are a cartoonish understanding of violence and an utter absence of basic human empathy.
If Laredo weren't so awful, it would be a shame that Timeless's two DVD collections (which contain the entire first season) cram five hour-long episodes onto each disc, coating Universal's serviceable if slightly drab video masters in a thick blanket of artifacts and edge enhancement. Tate, also from Timeless, looks a little better. But it was Infinity's Man with a Camera package that really impressed me. The episodes are transferred from 16mm, but the prints – from the collection of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, also the source of Mister Peepers and hopefully more classic TV gems to come – are in excellent condition, and they have been rendered onto DVD with about as much detail as one could hope from that format.


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A great piece on the importance of retail advertsing to the newspaper business and the indirect fight between Amazon and the papers happening now.
"Classifieds has decimated by interactive databases. National has migrated strongly digital. Retail, which made up of just 47 percent of newspaper ad revenues 10 years ago, is now up to 57 percent of newspaper totals. Now that advertising, albeit in just a few markets initially, will have to compete with Amazon-forced marketplace change.
Amazon, of course, isn't targeting newspaper revenues. It's targeting customers — selling more to current ones and engaging new ones. Further hits to newspaper revenue are just another unintended consequence of accelerating disruption of all business as usual. "
The creation of new marketplaces for shopping on the web, tablets and mobile are at the center of what the newspapers must to move past relevance in retail shopping to being critical players for local retail shopping in the next 10 years
The newsonomics of Amazon vs. Main Street » Nieman Journalism Lab.


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The DWR Friday Classical Interlude – Mozart Horn Quintet E flat K407
December 3, 2021 in Music | Tags: The DWR Friday Classical Interlude - Mozart Horn Quintet E flat K407
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PHOENIX (AP) — The second winner of the $587.5 million Powerball jackpot is a 37-year-old electronics industry professional who grew up in a modest home in Pennsylvania and moved to an affluent Phoenix suburb last year before striking it rich in the lotto.
The winner is Matthew Good of Fountain Hills, who chose to remain anonymous after claiming the prize last week. Lottery winners in Arizona are a matter of public record, and The Associated Press filed a public records request to learn his name.
Good took the one-time payout of $192 million from the Nov. 28 drawing, telling lottery officials the looming fiscal cliff was the reason he claimed the winnings now and not in the next calendar year. He had 180 days to claim his share of the jackpot.
Good grew up on a working-class block in Wormleysburg, Pa., near Harrisburg. His stepmother, Charlotte Good, said in an interview with the AP that Good was "a typical kid" who has always worked hard. She said he waited until Saturday to phone his father Ray with the news.
"My husband, he just can't get over it," said Charlotte Good, 63, a retired state Revenue Department employee. "It's his son."
He told his father "they're out of sight and they would contact him," she said.
No one answered the door Monday at Good's home, which has a tile roof and desert landscaping.
Property records showed that Good paid $289,900 for the 2,500-square-foot home in September 2011. The real estate listing describes the house as having gorgeous mountain views, vaulted ceilings, a backyard with an outdoor kitchen and a three-car garage.
Good previously issued a statement that said: "It is difficult to express just how thankful we are for this wonderful gift. We are extremely grateful and feel fortunate to now have an increased ability to support our charities and causes. Obviously, this has been incredibly overwhelming and we have always cherished our privacy."
Charlotte Good said she helped raise Matt from the age of 5 — after his biological mother had died of cancer — and until his late teens, when he moved in to the house next door to live with his ailing grandfather.
Charlotte Good was reading details about her stepson's winnings from Internet accounts on Monday while she packed for an impending move.
Matt Good attended Cedar Cliff High School in Camp Hill, and had been working in the electronics field when they moved to Arizona a year ago, she said. A LinkedIn profile for Matthew Good in Fountain Hills lists him as a training manager for an electronics company.
Neighbors said they were slightly acquainted with Good and described him as a generous, amiable person who keeps up his property.
Randy Tanner, who lives next door, said Good has a warm relationship with his daughter, who is about 5. Good recently helped Tanner carry a table to a friend's house in the neighborhood.
"You can't beat them for neighbors," said retired police officer Jerry Meltzer, who lives across the street.
Good bought $10 worth of tickets and kept the winner in the visor of his car overnight before realizing he was an instant millionaire.
Lotto officials said he gave $20 to the cashier of a Fountain Hills convenience store, and the clerk nudged him to spend the entire amount on tickets. He declined the offer.
After Good and his wife learned of their good fortune, he pulled together a team of financial advisers and decided to take his share this month to avoid potentially higher taxes in 2013.
Lottery officials said Good's wife owns half the prize because Arizona is a community property state.
A mechanic and his wife, Mark and Cindy Hill, of Dearborn, Mo., already have claimed their half of the multistate Powerball prize.
The jackpot was the second-largest in U.S. history and set off a nationwide buying frenzy. At one point, tickets were selling at nearly 130,000 a minute.
Before the drawing, the jackpot had rolled over 16 consecutive times without any winners. In a Mega Millions drawing in March, three ticket buyers shared a $656 million jackpot, the largest lottery payout of all time.
Scolforo contributed to this report from Wormleysburg, Pa.


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A batch of cool new Captain America 2 movie art posters has been spotted out in the wild in LA.
Check them out:
(via Coming Soon)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier has an April 4, 2014 release directed by the Russ Bros. starring Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson, Sebastian Stan, Anthony Mackie, Cobie Smulders, Frank Grillo, Emily Van Camp, Hayley Atwell and Robert Redford.
Check out the Cosmic Book News Avengers Hub for more.
After the cataclysmic events in New York with The Avengers, Marvel's "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" finds Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America, living quietly in Washington, D.C. and trying to adjust to the modern world. But when a S.H.I.E.L.D. colleague comes under attack, Steve becomes embroiled in a web of intrigue that threatens to put the world at risk. Joining forces with the Black Widow, Captain America struggles to expose the ever-widening conspiracy while fighting off professional assassins sent to silence him at every turn. When the full scope of the villainous plot is revealed, Captain America and the Black Widow enlist the help of a new ally, the Falcon. However, they soon find themselves up against an unexpected and formidable enemy—the Winter Soldier.


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The Wednesday Playlist: Spies Abroad, DirecTV's Rogue, Meet ABC's Parents
In the spy game, intelligence is the most precious commodity. And in the world of fictional espionage, few authors of historical suspense deliver thrills with the crisp and unsparing intelligence of Alan Furst. BBC America's Spies of Warsaw, a two-part miniseries adaptation (concluding Tuesday, April 10) of his 2008 novel, loses none of its twisty allure and passionate urgency in the translation from page to screen (9/8c). Tension comes with the territory of late-'30s Poland, a country harboring refugees and dissidents in a murky culture of political intrigue, as everyone nervously waits for the jackboot to drop as rumors spread of Nazi aggression.
"Surprising how few secrets there are in our secret world," muses an enigmatic German doctor-in-exile as he trades information - if he can be trusted - with the story's protagonist, Jean-Francois Mercier (the dashing David Tennant, late of Doctor Who), a war hero who has come to Warsaw as the French embassy's military attaché. (Best not to dwell on his Scottish brogue; the polyglot blur of accents adds to the film's exotic appeal.) Mercier oversees a complex network of operatives who trade in seduction and blackmail, risking their lives to further his agenda of acquiring and analyzing news about Germany's preparations for war. The last thing he should have time for is a torrid affair with a lovely Parisian lawyer (Janet Montgomery, of CBS' short-lived Made in Jersey) who travels across dangerous borders for the League of Nations.
Their perilous escapades reach an exciting climax next Wednesday in a final mission aboard a Romania-bound train bearing hidden cargo. Throughout, Spies delivers the vicarious pleasures of old-fashioned spy movies with the bold contemporary frankness of the best of cable. But even at its most heroic, the story is tinged with darkness, because we know Warsaw's terrible fate when war inevitably comes. Such is the price of our own intelligence.
Likewise, there's a sense of fatalistic inevitability that haunts FX's first-rate thriller The Americans (10/9c), as we witness the desperate plotting of deeply embedded agents from the Russian "evil empire" as they try to stay a step ahead of the feds representing the Reagan administration. "You're going to lose this war. You know that, right? We're going to kick your motherland's ---," an adversary taunts Russian-in-hiding Phillip Jennings (an excellent Matthew Rhys) in the series' most intense episode yet, a true game-changer that escalates the covert homeland war between the FBI and the spies literally next door - or across the street.
The tension operates on several levels: the chill in the Jennings household that causes Phillip to separate from "wife" Elizabeth (Keri Russell), moving out to the dismay of their kids; the vindictiveness of their FBI neighbor Stan Beeman's boss Agent Gaad (a very effective Richard Thomas), who decides to retaliate against the Russians on their soil, a mission that deep-down-decent Stan (Noah Emmerich, never better) tries to distance himself from until a shocking turn of events forces him to reconsider.
There's a telling moment when the Jennings' sulking son Henry (Keidrich Sellati) turns in a social-studies paper on the Revolutionary War which simply reads: "America won." When challenged by his mom, he answers: "I didn't have anything else to say." America also won the cold war against Russia, but thankfully The Americans has plenty to say about the emotional cost of deception on both sides of the conflict.
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UNDERCOVER COP: DirecTV's first original series (as opposed to first-run acquisitions) wants to be Wiseguy on steroids, and Rogue (The Audience Network, 9/8c) certainly has over-the-top swagger to burn. Thandie Newton, beautiful but brittle, brings an almost comically tough edge to the hero's role of Grace Travis, an undercover detective working in Oakland, Calif., whose infiltration of the Laszlo mob family is interrupted by the drive-by killing of her young son, a tragedy that illuminates her failings as a wife and mother. (And the family never misses an opportunity to remind her. No wonder she prefers work.)
When clues link her boy's death to an attempt on the life of mob boss Jimmy Laszlo (Marton Csokas), the grieving Grace recklessly goes back undercover without backup at work or at home. Her sole motivation is to bring justice to her fallen son, even if it entails investigating who's after Jimmy, creating a dangerously weird symbiotic relationship, the only narrative element of Rogue conveying any surprise. Rogue has all the attributes of pay cable - rough language, extreme violence and no-kidding graphic sexuality and nudity - but little of its depth and nuance. It's never as original, memorable or enjoyable as Cinemax's pulp guilty-pleasure Banshee. Give Newton credit, though. She's doing some heroically heavy lifting here, because with the exception of Ian Hart as a broken-down detective on her squad, the supporting cast (especially the Laszlo sons) is mostly awful.
MEET THE GRAND-PARENTS: If just being wacky is enough to make your night, then you might feel right at home with ABC's How to Live With Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life), which presents the endearingly flustered Sarah Chalke (of Scrubs and second Becky-on-Roseanne fame) as Polly, the "normal one" in a fractured family of outrageously vulgar clowns who barely resemble human beings.
"I'm not a failure. I'm trendy," Polly tries to convince herself, and us, in the set-up for the pilot episode (9:31/8:31c) as she flees her broken marriage to a still-smitten idiot and brings her cute little daughter to live at the home of her free-spirited mom and stepdad. Thankfully, Weeds' delirious Elizabeth Perkins and Everybody Loves Raymond's gruff giant Brad Garrett are skilled comedians, and while Garrett doesn't get to do much beyond bluster, Perkins makes the most of her dizzy Auntie Mame-like character, a boozy sexual libertine who declares, when reluctantly asked to babysit, "Kids are boring. We're the fascinating ones." There are laughs to be had as Polly's first post-divorce date goes off the rails, thanks to her own (and her date's) neuroses and the general level of mayhem perpetrated by her oafish folks' lack of discretion and control. But between the cutesy on-screen captions and an anything-goes sensibility that flirts with child endangerment (just kidding, kind of), Parents ultimately just feels like it's trying too hard.
THE ANTI-CLIMAX: On the other hand, ABC's on-fire family comedy The Middle (8/7c) feels especially real, hitting close to any TV addict's home in a storyline involving Frankie's unnatural attachment to The Bachelor. While I'm sure some might see this as synergistic abuse of ABC self-promotion, it's absolutely in character, as Frankie (Emmy-worthy Patricia Heaton) declares, "This is my escape." And when long-suffering husband Mike (the invaluable Neil Flynn) reminds her that the Oscars are also her escape, she barks, "I have a lot to escape from, OK?" Fair enough. But when the bachelor's ultimate pick in the season finale doesn't go Frankie's way, she can't handle it, going into a tailspin of comic despair that is no bed of roses for Mike, who mutters, "20 years and I've never once slapped you, but..." It's only a matter of time before she reaches for that box of wine. Meanwhile, in a lovely B-story, Mike coaches Sue (Eden Sher, hilariously ebullient as ever) to stop being so nice to her opponents in tennis, but what happens next is a first for Poor Sue.
It's a full night of new episodes for TV's best comedy line-up. On Suburgatory, now airing earlier where it should have been all season (8:30/7:30c), George (Jeremy Sisto) becomes fixated on his body when posing for a "Dads of Chatswin" calendar. ... In what sounds like a promising detour for Modern Family (9/8c), Phil and Claire are confronted by "The Future Dunphys" (the episode title) when they meet a family that could be them in the future, and it isn't pretty.
THE CRIME BLOTTER: B.D. Wong returns to NBC's Law & Order: SVU (9/8c) as Dr. Huang, consulting on the troubling case of a violent 9-year-old whose mother (Hope Davis) can't control him. Also dealing with new parenting issues: Detective Amaro (Danny Pino). ... Shaquille O'Neal guests on TNT's Southland (10/9c) in a rare bit of stunt casting, as a drug dealer's funeral leads to mayhem on the mean streets. ... There's a family connection on CBS' CSI (10/9c) as Ted Danson's daughter Kate plays a lawyer in a story involving the discovery of what might be a serial killer's lair. ... Real-life policing is on display in Discovery's three-part Pot Cops (10/9c), following a strike team in Humboldt County, Calif., as they raid marijuana crops and take on the Mexican cartel.
THE WEDNESDAY GUIDE: The theme is classic rock, no ballads on Fox's American Idol (8/7c), which can't be good news for a collapsing crooner like Lazaro. ... The tribes finally merge, just in time for a disgusting food challenge on CBS' Survivor (8/7c), where all the buzz is about a blindside. ... On Showtime's 60 Minutes Sports (9/8c), Lara Logan interviews longtime ESPN sportscaster Chris Berman, Byron Pitts (who just signed with ABC News) reports on a revitalized Los Angeles Dodgers, and Steve Kroft shoots a round of golf with renowned golf-course designer Pete Dye. ... Joel McHale hosts E!'s The Soup Awards (10/9c), commemorating the year's most outrageous TV moments, which certainly could fill more than an hour. ... TV Land puts five "juniors" under 30 and five "seniors" over 70 in the same house in the comedic reality experiment Forever Young (10/9c), which only manages to make me nostalgic for the theme song from Parenthood.
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View original The Wednesday Playlist: Spies Abroad, DirecTV's Rogue, Meet ABC's Parents at TVGuide.com
Other Links From TVGuide.com
- Elizabeth Perkins
- Ian Hart
- Keri Russell
- Marton Csokas
- Matthew Rhys
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- Richard Thomas
- Sarah Chalke
- Brad Garrett
- Neil Flynn
- The Bachelor
- David Tennant
- Eden Sher
- The Middle
- Janet Montgomery
- How to Live With Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life)
- The Americans
- Spies of Warsaw
- Keidrich Sellati
- Rogue


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Does size really matter?
On Sundays, I publish a post of 200 words (or less). But every blogger knows anything under 300 500 1,000 (what is it now?) words is not a "real" post.
Huh. My fingers were flying across the keyboard as my ideas were pouring out. I recall reading and responding to comments. I could have sworn that was real.
Even my full-length posts are usually only 300-700 words. I say what I need to say then get the hell out of Dodge.
Yes, I know: Google spiders, SEO, zzz…
When I taught, I rarely gave my students a firm word count. If the assignment would clearly benefit from a strict number of words I did but, most of the time, when they asked, "How long does it have to be?" I answered, "As long as it needs to be."
Yes. I'm sure that annoyed some students. Moving on.
If you go on and on (and on and on) when you write, maybe you should think about whether you need every single word. If you simply love writing long pieces, that's great. Go for it.
I prefer short, to-the-point posts. I enjoy writing them, and I enjoy reading them. I will read lengthy posts but only if they're super duper awesome with a cherry on top. I don't have anything against long blog posts.
Why do so many bloggers have a thing against short posts?
Reason #1. It won't be picked up in search engines. That's kind of my problem, not the reader's. They don't need to worry about me. I'll be fine. Really.
Reason #2. "It's annoying" to click on a link and be directed to a post with less than X number of words because it has no "substance". This one irks me. Substance and length have absolutely nothing to do with each other. I have read some loooong posts with lots of "keywords" that were fluff. A bunch of letters grouped together on a page without saying anything. Those are impressive. I mean, seriously, that's got to be tough to do. How does one even go about writing 3,000 words without saying anything? I've got to take a class on that.
I've also read some short, thought-provoking posts that pack a punch.
If you have a lot to say on a subject and it takes 2,000 words to say it, that's cool. I'll read it. But please do give the little posts a chance. Writers can sometimes surprise you with how much they can say in 400 words (give or take).
"Don't use seven words when four will do."
My Sunday thoughts in (way over) 200 words. I know, irony is fun.
I was going to stay far away from this but I… Just… Can't. So, for you, gentle readers, here's what I'm saying in a nutshell: It's not the size that matters, it's how you use it.
Do you have a specific word count you stick to? Do you force yourself to keep writing a post because it's too short even if you feel like it's done? Does the size of your blog post really matter?


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Scrapbook: The right to say no
Published by Billy Mann
I'm originally from Liverpool and worked as a national magazine journalist for more than 30 years before suffering a stroke at age 53. I started blogging as part of a neuro-rehabilitation programme and wrote the very first entries with one finger of my disabled left hand. Later, art became another therapy for me at Headway East London's Submit To Love studios. I blog regularly and volunteer as a teaching assistant, coaching schoolchildren in aspects of journalism. View all posts by Billy Mann


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A flash prompt with purpose. Sarah is raising awareness for the victims of the recent hurricanes, pledging to donate $1 for each response received up to $50 and giving writers another chance to practice their art. Happy writing. Source: Flash Fiction Prompt for Hurricane Relief #Flash4Storms
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Irene Waters
Irene Waters 19 Writer Memoirist
I began my working career as a reluctant potato peeler whilst waiting to commence my training as a student nurse. On completion I worked mainly in intensive care/coronary care; finishing my hospital career as clinical nurse educator in intensive care. A life changing period as a resort owner/manager on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu was followed by recovery time as a farmer at Bucca Wauka. Having discovered I was no farmer and vowing never again to own an animal bigger than myself I took on the Barrington General Store. Here we also ran a five star restaurant. Working the shop of a day 7am - 6pm followed by the restaurant until late was surprisingly more stressful than Tanna. On the sale we decided to retire and renovate our house with the help of a builder friend. Now believing we knew everything about building we set to constructing our own house. Just finished a coal mine decided to set up in our backyard. Definitely time to retire we moved to Queensland. I had been writing a manuscript for some time. In the desire to complete this I enrolled in a post grad certificate in creative Industries which I completed 2013. I followed this by doing a Master of Arts by research graduating in 2017. Now I live to write and write to live.
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Thanks to Jennifer Romano and Talk of the Town! Read here. Quote from yours truly: "As my blog rolls into another year of entertainment, rife with comic book adaptations, sequels, Oscar bait, arena shows, and theatrical productions big and small, sometimes I wonder if I am choking the life right from this hobby of mine. Can you imagine if every time you saw a film that your OCD tendencies forced you to rush home, throw some quippy hoo-ha on the internet, and wait eagerly for 3.5 comments to appear? Ah, well, it's still too much fun to stop now—anticipate Volume THREE Roy's Movie Migraine shortly."
BONUS: Enjoy this fabulous new blog entry from my mom Susie Duncan Sexton – provocative and fun! Read "Got (almond) milk? Books, movies, politics, culture, and AGRIganda" by clicking here.
Excerpt: "Regarding BUT HAVE YOU READ THE BOOK jazz, my mother ALWAYS asked that question. Guess what? She very seldom had actually read the books herself; I preferred to write my book reports based on the more enjoyable movie versions!"
Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital)
In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan.
My mom Susie Duncan Sexton's Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.


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It was free T-Shirt Tuesday tonight at Nationals Park, and the stands were filled with 10,000 Nationals fans wearing free Abe Lincoln t-shirts.
Based on the results from the previous T-Shirt Tuesdays, Abe had to be the prohibitive favorite to run away with tonight's presidents race, but when the middle of the 4th inning arrived, it was #26 Teddy Roosevelt who jumped out to the big lead, which he extended as he rounded the warning track into the home stretch along the first base line.
But as Teddy approached the finish line, he lost his shoe, tripped and fell. Abe came charging from behind and hurdled over Teddy to claim his 24th presidents race victory this season.
George, Tom, and Abe have now all held serve on their free T-Shirt Tuesdays at Nationals Park. Unfortunately we have to wait another month for Teddy's big night. Let's hope his shoes are tied tight on August 12.


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Over the Counter: Chocolate, caffeine good for your health
Over the Counter: Chocolate, caffeine good for your health
Jeanne Calment is the French woman who lived the longest authenticated human life: 122 years and 164 days.
While it seems that so much of longevity is tied to the genetic hand we are dealt at birth, we certainly can adopt and pursue lifestyles that improve our chances for living longer, or, for that matter, not spending as much time on earth as we could have had we taken a healthier route.
Much is made of Ms. Calment's lifestyle and diet. Incredibly, she smoked until she was about 110 (science suggests Ms. Calment had a rare, innate biological protection from the deleterious effects of the bad habit). Yet, she was also riding a bike until she was 100 -- and she continued to walk until a few months short of her 115th birthday, when she broke her femur.
Ms. Calment, who died in 1997, said she did not get stressed about too much. Her regular diet included olive oil, port wine … and … get ready … up to 2 pounds of chocolate a week, only giving up the sweet when she had reached the age of 119.
Could chocolate have had something to do with that amazing life span?
Perhaps, yes, maybe a little bit. And chocolate is a sweeter – excuse the pun – alternative to other life extending therapies.
We are finding out more almost every day about the health benefits of chocolate and cocoa, the main ingredient in chocolate.
What is it in chocolate that is good for us?
Chocolate -- especially dark chocolate -- is rich in antioxidants called flavonoids. Clinical research has shown that flavonoids can reduce and prevent cardiovascular damage and lower blood pressure.
Science also supports that dark chocolate flavonoids have a positive effect on blood cholesterol -- pushing the bad form down, and raising the good form.
Chocolate contains phenylethylamine, a chemical compound which affects the central nervous system in a manner that induces positive feelings. Most of the phenylethylamine ingested when eating chocolate is metabolized before it reaches the brain; still, some of the compound does make it to our gray matter.
Theobromine, a chemical compound closely related to caffeine, is found in nature in its most concentrated form in the cocoa bean. This compound boosts low blood sugar and has both a stimulatory effect -- yet a far milder one than caffeine -- and a slight diuretic effect, meaning it causes more frequent urination.
The health qualities of chocolate, however, do not mean you should eat every candy bar in sight. Again, it is the dark chocolate that is good for you. Milk chocolate, as delicious as it is, has little health benefit. You want dark chocolate that is at least 70 percent cacao (percentage of cocoa solids), and which is not high in sugar or hydrogenated oil.
Chocolate with a lower cacao percentage generally means there is more room for sugar and other non-cocoa ingredients, which, of course, is not a good thing. But even with high-quality chocolate, one must be mindful that too much of anything -- even the best dark chocolate -- can be bad for you. Eating too much good chocolate will add unhealthy pounds, which are a danger.
And this brings us to the caffeine, which is found in cocoa and chocolate, but also of course in coffee.
Taken from the USDA National Nutrient Database, the caffeine content per 100 grams of dry and unsweetened cocoa is 230 milligrams; dark chocolate (constituted of 70 to 85 percent cacao solids) is 80 milligrams; brewed coffee is 40 milligrams; and milk chocolate is 20 milligrams.
Of course, different foods we will regularly consume in different quantities and concentrations. For perspective, a cup of homemade cocoa has five milligrams of caffeine; a cup of brewed coffee has 95 milligrams of caffeine; a 3.56 ounce bar of dark chocolate (with the same cacao percentage as above) has 81 milligrams of caffeine; and there are nine milligrams of caffeine in a 1.5 ounce bar of milk chocolate.
Caffeine affects each person differently; some people can drink a small amount of caffeinated coffee and stay jittery for hours. Others can drink coffee all day and be asleep almost as soon as their head hits the pillow.
In the right amounts – about 200 to 300 milligrams a day for most people – caffeine is good for the body, as it stimulates and assists the liver in detoxifying and cleansing itself. Small doses of caffeine also stimulate the adrenal glands which regulate hormones and support the kidneys in filtering toxins.
Theobromine and caffeine, working alone or together, help the body purify.
Caffeine and dark chocolate can give the body a healthy boost.
At Johnson Compounding & Wellness Center, we carry three brands of high quality chocolate: Green & Blacks Organic, Divine Chocolate, and Chocolove.
Tea, in its many different forms, has caffeine, and in lower levels than found in coffee.
Tea is truly a health food, with its small amounts of caffeine and a trove of other healthy substances, such as antioxidants, tannins, and polyphenols. Scientific research has identified tea as cancer fighting, immune boosting, artery cleansing, weight reducing, and age defying.
It is good to keep in mind that moderating the length of time you steep the tea moderates the level of caffeine in the beverage: longer time steeping, more caffeine; shorter time steeping, less caffeine.
"Drinking a daily cup of tea will surely starve the apothecary," says a Chinese proverb.
Consumed in appropriate amounts and in the right form, chocolate and caffeine are good for body and mind. And that is surely the type of health news with which not too many would be inclined to argue.
Steve Bernardi is a compounding pharmacist and Dr. Gary Kracoff is a registered pharmacist and a naturopathic doctor at Johnson Compounding and Wellness Center in Waltham, Mass. (www.naturalcompounder.com). Readers with questions about natural or homeopathic medicine, compounded medications, or health in general can e-mail firstname.lastname@example.com or call 781-893-3870.


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Over the weekend, I noticed that NPR's data journalist Matt Stiles had created a data set based on this blog (yes, I find these things). His plans weren't clear until yesterday, when he published Charting Presidential Mascot Races at The Daily Viz.
Stiles says he tries to create a data visualization every day, and the above chart does a nice job of visualizing Abe Lincoln's slow decline.
Stiles also set up a link where you can create word trees from the blog based on any keyword you choose.
Check it out …if you want to waste your lunch hour.


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FreeBSD Manual Pages
FWOHCI(4) BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual FWOHCI(4) NAME fwohci -- OHCI FireWire chipset device driver SYNOPSIS To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following line in your kernel configuration file: device firewire Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5): firewire_load="YES" HARDWARE The fwohci driver provides support for PCI/CardBus FireWire interface cards. The driver supports the following IEEE 1394 OHCI chipsets: o Adaptec AHA-894x/AIC-5800 o Apple Pangea o Apple UniNorth o Intel 82372FB o IOGEAR GUF320 o Lucent / Agere FW322/323 o NEC uPD72861 o NEC uPD72870 o NEC uPD72871/2 o NEC uPD72873 o NEC uPD72874 o National Semiconductor CS4210 o Ricoh R5C551 o Ricoh R5C552 o Sony CX3022 o Sony i.LINK (CXD1947) o Sony i.LINK (CXD3222) o Sun PCIO-2 (RIO 1394) o Texas Instruments PCI4410A o Texas Instruments PCI4450 o Texas Instruments PCI4451 o Texas Instruments TSB12LV22 o Texas Instruments TSB12LV23 o Texas Instruments TSB12LV26 o Texas Instruments TSB43AA22 o Texas Instruments TSB43AB21/A/AI/A-EP o Texas Instruments TSB43AB22/A o Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 o Texas Instruments TSB82AA2 o VIA Fire II (VT6306) SEE ALSO firewire(4), fwe(4), fwip(4), sbp(4), fwcontrol(8), kldload(8) HISTORY The fwohci device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 5.0. AUTHORS The fwohci device driver was written by Katsushi Kobayashi and Hidetoshi Shimokawa. BUGS The driver allows physical access from any nodes on the bus by default. This means that any devices on the bus can read and modify any memory space which can be accessed by an IEEE 1394 OHCI chip. It is allowed mostly for sbp(4) devices. This should be changed to allow it only for specific devices. Anyway, FireWire is a bus and not expected to be con- nected with un-trustable devices because a node can monitor all the traf- fic. BSD June 23, 2005 BSD
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